Hacking Sexual Pleasure

Everyone wants more pleasure with less effort, so humans have used mechanical augmentation for ages: prehistoric dildos and porn, Kama Sutra treatises, lubes, piercings, and lately vibrators and Viagra.

But since sex is really all about electrical nerve impulses, shouldn't electronics and signal processing be able to enhance pleasure even further? Can't we geeks contribute technology to our favorite activity?

Unfortunately, technical types often ask "What can we do with our cool tech?", rather than "How and why does sex feel good?"

Sex is complicated

Desire, engorgement, lubrication. So many sensations: teasing, urgency, incipient climax, contraction, affectionate pair-bonding, sleepiness.

And half a dozen hormones or neurotransmitters - testosterone, dopamine, oxytocin, vasopressin, prolactin - both create and respond to sensations and expectations in myriad positive and negative feedback loops.

Several different nerve pathways are involved: in the woman, the majority of nerves are in the clitoral head (not the vagina), while the "G-spot" is really the backside of the clitoris.

The sciatic nerve is nearby, and an unrelated non-spinal nerve (the vagus) seems involved; at least one woman with a severed spinal cord was still able to orgasm.

Vascular dynamics and anatomy aside, science hasn't been much help. Recent MRI images of sex really just show the shape of the interlocking genitals, nothing more. The only way to "measure" sensation is to ask people what it feels like.

Even the basics aren't so basic; in both men and women, orgasmic sensation can sometimes occur without contractions or ejaculation, and vice versa. Such exceptions matter, because "hacking" cares more about how a system can work than how it was designed to work.

In this context, having fun and "getting off" aren't necessarily the same thing.

Advertsing Is Out to Get Us

Democracy beware! TV titans and the marketing industry are gearing up to sap our will and make Americans more passive than ever. Their ultimate goal: the breakup of American character followed by the commercialization of the American soul.

This is TV’s negotiating time with advertisers. Networks and advertisers are meeting this month to plot the reinforcement and intensification of our mindless absorption of TV commercials.

It seems that not enough of us are sitting comatose for hours of non-stop consumerist reverie.

Too many of us, apparently, are getting up from TV sets to stretch our legs and use the bathroom. The industry is also upset at us for muting the commercials and wandering off to have a beer or acknowledge a family member.

According to a report this week in The New York Times, TV titans are planning changes to please advertisers that include integrating the actors and actresses from the programming into the ads, as well as simultaneously showing more ads with the programming.

The goal, one marketing executive said proudly, “is to blur the line between content and advertising message.”

Thank you, TV land, for blurring that line and making the impaired vision of more Americans your policy contribution to national health. That vision thing that democrats talk about is overrated anyway.

Instilling Fear of 'Terror'

The archetypal warmonger, Dick Cheney, claims that evil terrorists everywhere are plotting for the ruin of "civilized" nations.

In order to stop them we must militarily control all the regions they are threatening in a permanent global war.

Israel, and the United States, and all civilized nations will win the war on terror.

To prevail in this fight, we must understand the nature of the enemy. As America experienced on September 11th, 2001, the terrorist enemy is brutal and heartless.

This enemy wears no uniform, has no regard for the rules of warfare, and is unconstrained by any standard of decency or morality.

The terrorists want to end all American and Western influence in the Middle East.

Their goal in that region is to seize control of a country, so they have a base from which to launch attacks and wage war against governments that do not meet their demands ultimately to establish a totalitarian empire that encompasses a region from Spain, across North Africa, through the Middle East and South Asia, all the way around to Indonesia.

Probably no word better defines or underscores the Bush presidency than "terrorism" even though his administration wasn't the first to exploit this highly charged term.

"Terrorism" is used to explain what "they do to us" to justify what we "do to them," or plan to, always deceitfully couched in terms of humanitarian intervention, promoting democracy, or bringing other people the benefits of western civilization.

Ronald Reagan exploited it in the 1980s to declare "war on international terrorism" referring to it as the "scourge of terrorism" and "the plague of the modern age."

It was clear he had in mind launching his planned Contra proxy war of terrorism against the democratically elected Sandinista government in Nicaragua and FMLN opposition resistance to the US-backed El Salvador fascist regime the same way George Bush did it waging his wars of aggression post-9/11.

It's a simple scheme to pull off, and governments keep using it because it always works.

Scare the public enough, and they'll go along with almost anything thinking it's to protect their safety when, in fact, waging wars of aggression and state-sponsored violence have the opposite effect.

The current Bush wars united practically the entire world against us including an active resistance increasingly targeting anything American.

tags: zeitgeist  

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